The first change

One question that has always troubled me is "If I change for better, how big an impact will it have on the rest of the world?"

The answer has usually been dismal. Until now.

I aimlessly pondered over this question again that day when suddenly I stumbled upon a simple clue I missed. Or maybe I never understood it before.

HASSAAN AKRAM the person isn't just a person. He has a world in himself. Just like 6 billion or so other worlds. Worlds of perception. Or infact worlds generated by perceptions. The world inside me has a country has a society has multiple ethnicities just as the world outside. The only difference is that in my world, I see things just the way I want to. While in the real world things happen according to some other pattern.

But astonishingly, the situation is almost the same in both worlds. In my own world I make sure I don't have to go through any pains and for that I use money, influence and all that Jazz. I only want my loved ones to develop and I make sure my enemies are hindered. I miss no chance of dreaming a dream and perceiving a world that has me as the centre of it all. And I succeed.

I am one of 170 million worlds of this country. In fact, we all link up to form a cluster called Pakistan, our Home our society. Imagine 170 million small world's with as many centres, imagine the singleness of purpose, to live selfish dishonest lives, to lie to God and ourselves, and the world, the real world, becomes that. We curse the real world but fail to crush our own.

Let me think. If I detach myself, think a bit, change a lot and change for the better, now what will happen?

My place in the cluster will be filled with a better world, or a better perception of the world. Every link around me would notice, with hatred or with love, they will. Maybe somewhere else someone else decides to change, then someone else then it grows. We'll start seeing our own worlds differently. Our actions would testify the change.

I saw this new world more clearly when I threw my last wrapper on the road. Immediately I thought, 170 million wrappers on our roads? Quickly I picked it up.

Somewhere else someone else must have picked one too.

Then I imagined a clean world. I picked someone else's wrapper.

Imagine, if even half of us had thought of changing at that moment we would have cleaned the entire mess.

We all exist individually and collectively. Thus changing for the better, no matter how small that change is, is very important. This change is important because somewhere someone else who wants to change like you do needs to know its possible. And that they have company.

May God give us to be the first raindrops. They are always the most delighting :)

Dichotomy

I feel very dichotomic in my own self. One part of me takes the corrective pen in Hand and wants to heal the society, to counter poverty, depravity, faithlessness, dishonesty, intolerance etc while the other part just closes eyes on all of it and imagines man inside a cocoon, a being given so much potential he's never realised. This part of me sees all of us as works of complex art, wanting to be understood. This part considers travelling and exploring this world one of the most important things in appreciating the creation of Allah.

But however dichotomic all this is, the one satisfying thought is that both these ways of discovering God are neither mutually exclusive nor mutually dependant and they aren't the only ways in the world.

over time I have developed an intense energy that comes from the feeling that all is unknown and all is uncertain to me. Thank God He never gave us the ability to see the future, it would've killed whatever little desire we have to use our God given abilities.